Making it better

Friday

Things turned bad at a young age for University of Oregon Law School student Jon Patterson.

“The first time someone called me a fag, I was 8 years old,” Patterson says in a video that he and six classmates posted on YouTube this week.

In it, fellow UO law student Zachary Smallwood recounts being taunted in the eighth grade simply for bringing his violin to school each day. “One day, one of my best friends sat next to me and said, ‘You know, I just want you to know that only gay guys play the violin.’?”

Classmate Sarah Spring tells of being warned as a teen that “because I am gay, I couldn’t even get a job at McDonalds.”

Such negative stories, however, only set up the real point of their video: describing their satisfying adult lives as part of a mushrooming “It Gets Better Project.”

“Guess what?” Spring goes on in her testimonial. “Here I am today, in law school, and gay.”

The project was started last month by Seattle gay rights activist Dan Savage, who writes a syndicated sex advice column for readers of all sexual orientations.

His and other “It Gets Better” stories gained international attention in the aftermath of the Sept. 22 suicide of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi. The freshman jumped to his death from New York’s George Washington Bridge after two other students secretly filmed his sexual encounter with another man and then posted it on the Internet.

But Savage actually launched his project more than a week earlier, in response to a string of youth suicides that included a 15-year-old Indiana boy who hung himself Sept. 9 in his family’s barn. Billy Lucas never called himself gay, according to news accounts, but was tormented simply because classmates perceived him that way.

In interviews, Savage has said he started It Gets Better because he wished he could have talked to the dead youth “for five minutes.” He’s said that he understands their feelings of despair because of his own experiences as a gay teenager. But what he knows now, he says, is that “life gets so much better.”

“When a gay student kills himself, what he’s saying is that he can’t picture a future with enough joy in it to compensate for the pain in his life now,” Savage has said.

Savage’s message — and those of thousands of It Gets Better videos posted in the last month — is that such youth don’t have to be filled with despair.

“As an openly gay adult, it can get great,” he says. “It can get awesome.”

Smallwood, who organized the law students’ It Gets Better message, agrees.

“We made this video for you because we want you to know that we have a community,” he tells troubled teens who may watch it. “We’re loved, we have great friends, we have great family, we have wonderful partners.”

Adults who work with local gay and lesbian youth say they welcome “It Gets Better” for its message of hope to teens who can feel like targeted outcasts, and because it can raise other students’ awareness of the pain that bullying causes.

“In my classes, these issues come up all the time,” said Willamette High School social studies teacher Anna Niklas, who also serves as faculty advisor to the west Eugene school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. The local chapter is part of a national group dedicated to creating safe school environments for all students.

“They meet once a week at Willamette,” Niklas said of the student club. “They check in with each other and make sure each other is OK.”

Laura Philips leads a weekly drop-in support group for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and “questioning” students attending a variety of area middle and high schools.

“All of the attention to this and to the recent suicides around the country is, on one hand, very upsetting,” Philips said. “On the other hand, the fact that this goes on is not news to local teens. They’re glad to see greater attention being paid by the general public to an issue that particularly affects them and their friends.”

The support group, sponsored by Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gay, meets Friday afternoons at Amazon Community Center. The group has met for more than a dozen years, so some of its own alumni are testament to Savage’s message, Philips said.

“It’s very gratifying to hear from young people now in their 20s how happy and successful they are,” she said.

The video-producing UO students are all members of OUTLaws, a law school student organization that promotes “awareness, education, support and understanding for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer legal issues and civil rights.”

They decided to collaborate on their own video to lend their diverse voices to the cause.

“I think it was around college time when I realized, ‘Hey, you know what? I’m fabulous. And if you don’t like it, so what,’?” Patterson says in the video.

“You’ll find that there are so many things out there to pursue … beyond middle school and high school,” added Smallwood, a graduate of Thurston High School in Springfield. “So, hang in there. Your life’s so important. And it’s gonna get better.”

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